Google ad exec tapped to head AOL

Tim Armstrong, CEO, AOL

Time Warner's CEO Jeff Bewkes announced this evening that AOL's current chairman and CEO Randy Falco will be replaced by Tim Armstrong, President of Google's American Operations and board member of the Advertising Council, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and The Advertising Research Foundation.

Bewkes called Armstrong an advertising pioneer, who has "a stellar reputation and proven track record." Armstrong will also be of crucial importance in Time Warner's decisions about the future of the AOL brand.

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Palm Pre and Sprint reveal plan pricing options

Palm Pre with charger

They won't say when it'll arrive and they won't say how much it'll cost, but representatives from Palm and Sprint on Thursday were willing to talk about stuff like service plans for the wildly anticipated (though not anytime soon) Palm Pre.

It'll be the Everything plans for would-be Pre users: The available individual service plans, according to company officials will be for 400 minutes, 900 minutes, and the $100 all-you-can-eat Simply Everything option. For families, the options are 1500 minutes, 3000 minutes or (again) Simply Everything for $190. Beyond that, they say testing's going well, including on the Touchstone inductive charger, and Palm officials reaffirmed that they're not out of the Windows Mobile business yet, with more devices on the way. (David Owens, director of consumer acquisition for Sprint. also assured the webcast audience that really, they've heard every possibly Pre pun by now; no reason to offer more -- though your writer feels that pre-empting such things pre-liminary to launch is just... pre-posterous.)

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Quelle horreur: French president wants to chop net access for alleged downloaders

French President Nicolas Sarkozy

French President Nicolas Sarkozy wishes to create a national surveillance program to monitor Internet users and, if they're thought to be illegally sharing content, to cut off their Net access for up to a year.

The proposed law was debated in the French Parliament this week. Sarkozy, whose model-actress wife Carla Bruni has recorded an album, is convinced that France's music and movie industries are suffering because the citizenry is downloading its wares.

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Microsoft exec to join DHS as CIO nominee gets tangled in FBI raid

Phil Reitinger

Will the last person in Seattle to leave for the Obama administration please turn off the Space Needle? The Department of Homeland Security today announced that a senior Microsoft exec will step into a major cybersecurity role. Meanwhile, back in the other Washington, an FBI raid at the former DC CTO offices of new federal CIO Vivek Kundra is raising questions.

The raid, which appears to have been predicated on a bribery sting operation, is not known to involve Vivek, whom President Obama nominated to be his chief information officer a week ago today. But there have been two arrests -- Yusuf Acar, an information systems security officer with the city, and Sushil Bansal, president and chief executive of Advanced Integrated Technologies Corp. AITC has a number of contracts with city agencies including the DMV, and the city's human-resources department; Mr. Bansal used to be a city government employee. Both men appeared in federal court Thursday afternoon and corruption charges were brought against them.

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Version 3.0 of iPhone software to debut next week

iPhone 3G

Next Tuesday in Cupertino, California, Apple will unveil iPhone software version 3.0, according to an invitation received by the Apple faithful today.

Apple's popular mobile phone is currently on OS version 2.2.1 (Build 5H11), which was an incremental update pushed out in the first weeks of 2009. The last major update -- one that would warrant its own event, like the one scheduled for next week -- was version 2.0, when the 3G iPhone was released.

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A future for eBay that's solidly on the back burner

eBay Skype

Yesterday, eBay discussed with investors the company's outlook for the next three years. Fulfilling statements from CEO John Donahoe made nearly a year ago, the company's growth efforts will be spearheaded by PayPal, and will include more changes to the eBay marketplace.

Donahoe said, "We are aggressively remaking and transforming our eBay Marketplace and diversifying the ways in which we compete in e-commerce."
This aggressive transformation, however, has coincided with eBay's worst year to date. During 2008, eBay's CEO of ten years departed, policy changes caused an eBay seller revolt, the economy tightened the budgets of buyers, and the trade of counterfeit goods on site brought high profile lawsuits. The end of last year's holiday season saw eBay's net income drop $163.7 million dollars from the prior year.

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Vodafone now offers DRM-free music

Vodafone

Three of the "Big Four" major record labels, Sony, EMI, and Universal, have gotten on board with European carrier Vodafone to provide DRM-free music for the wireless carrier's music store.

Music tracks downloaded through Vodafone Music were formerly protected WMA, but soon the company says it will be selling music as unprotected MP3s. Those who have already purchased music as WMA are eligible for free MP3 crossgrades.

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Microsoft silent on whether version 8 will be the last Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer 8 IE8

This week, elements of the blogosphere drew speculative conclusions about a Microsoft Research paper released last month in time for TechFest, which concerned a prototype Web browser constructed expressly for the purpose of testing new concepts in Web browser user authentication. Cross-site scripting has, after all, been a security plague for nearly every browser at one time or another -- the ability for a script launched by one page to intentionally take control of a page in a completely different window.

Perhaps without even reading the paper itself (PDF available here), speculators concluded that it pointed either to the architecture of the next version of Internet Explorer, or that it somehow signaled the end of the Internet Explorer product line -- that somehow Microsoft, or Microsoft in conjunction with someone else (maybe the University of Washington?), would be making Web browsers for future editions of Windows but without the IE logo. It's a far, far extrapolation of a conclusion that could not possibly have been reached through any logical process.

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Greener batteries: Li-ion cells could charge up in mere seconds

Lithium ion batteries

Like most people, you're probably tired of waiting hours for your cell phone batteries to recharge. But now, researchers have discovered new technology that reportedly not only charges up batteries in seconds, but enables the batteries to hold their charge well.

In an article published yesterday in the prestigious journal Nature, Byoungwoo Kang and Gerbrand Ceder of MIT report they have figured out a way to get lithium ion batteries -- essentially the same type of battery used in products from mobile phones to hybrid automobiles -- to release and take up lithium ion molecules in under nine seconds.

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Amazon EC2 customers can pay up front to drive down hourly costs

Clouds..small fluffy clouds

In a move that could help cloud computing leader Amazon realize much of its revenues almost a year earlier, the company this morning announced an alternative payment structure for users of its EC2 cloud-based hosting service. For subscribers willing to pay up front for a one-year contract between $325 for a standard virtual machine instance and $2,600 for a CPU-intensive instance, their per-hour usage charges can be reduced around 75% - 80%.

The typical usage charge for a standard hosted Windows Server 2003 instance is $0.125 per hour, or $0.10 for Linux. Those charges will both decline to $0.03 per hour for subscribers who pay up front $325 for a one-year contract, or $500 for a three-year contract. "Extra Large High-CPU" instance usage charges drop from $1.20 per hour ($0.80 for Linux) to $0.24 per hour, for up-front payments of $2,600 for one-year, or $4,000 for three-year.

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iTunes 8.1 adds multi-remote feature

iTunes DJ logo (tiny)

Since the newest iPod shuffle requires iTunes 8.1 to function properly, Apple has released an update to the desktop music organization software. Though the update was brought around for the new iPod, the real benefits of the update go to multi-iPhone user groups.

ITunes 8.1 has eliminated "Party Shuffle," which is also known as "random," and has been replaced with "iTunes DJ." When iTunes is playing music largely at random, anyone with an iPod Touch or iPhone equipped with iTunes Remote (version 1.2) can request a song and vote when it will play. Betanews also attempted to use the feature this morning with Android Tunes Remote, but it looks like that software will also need to be updated to bring Android users into the DJ booth.

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Final preparations under way for Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 public rollout

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Download Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 for Windows from Fileforum now.

The rollout of what's still being called Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is now under way, although Mozilla's official announcement to the general public is still forthcoming. In the meantime, the organization has been actively calling upon its contributors to give one final round of tests, for what it's calling a worldwide test day.

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TV.com blasts competitors with 1080p streams

CBS eye logo (1950s)

TV.com -- CBS Interactive's answer to video sites like Hulu, Veoh, and Joost -- has announced today that it is beta testing streams in full 1080p high-definition.

The beta site includes clips of popular CBS properties CSI, Survivor, The Late Show With David Letterman, and even a classic Pink Panther cartoon.

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GAO warns that feds aren't ready for 2010 census

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A trio of reports released by the US Government Accountability Office in the wake of Congressional testimony last week warn that despite numerous warnings, crucial technology still isn't in place for the upcoming decennial (ten-year) census.

The 2010 Census Day is scheduled for April 1 (sound off! 1,2,3,4,5...) and expected to cost over $14 billion. However, before the government counts us, it has to figure out where we are -- not to mention what constitutes a house these days -- and get its counting tools in order.

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Google Voice debuts in previews for GrandCentral users

google voice logo

A trio of Google product developers on Wednesday night blogged the arrival of Google Voice, a new service for phone and voicemail management. The application, which includes such features as SMS text searches and voicemail transcripts, will preview first to GrandCentral subscribers.

Craig Walker, Vincent Paquet, and Wesley Chan posted the notice, advising GrandCentral users to expect changeover instructions via e-mail. (The rest of us can sign up to get on the invite list.) A full list of Google Voice features, including more mundane phone-service capabilities such as conference calling and voicemail forwards, is available on the site and demonstrated by a collection of short videos showing the service's integration with Gmail's contact list and an ordinary handset.

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